Origins 31 - Can Self-Help Become an Addiction

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Welcome to a live and free origins, the podcast where we continue to discuss common misconceptions,

practices, and sometimes even outright lives that make things like anxiety, depression, trauma,

and addictions of all kinds extremely hard if not impossible to get rid of.

We'll keep sharing what has worked in thousands of cases to change that and make freedom a reality.

Only now will be going even deeper. Also bringing back to the table the one thing that is the

source of any and all healing. God. So stick around for some bite-sized ideas that might unmask any

falsehood preventing the truth from finally setting you free. And if it feels helpful, don't forget

to share it with others. Okay, so we're going to get started on the self-help cycle thing again.

Sorry, I got sidetracked last time. All right, so here's the deal. You have an aha moment,

you have a breakthrough, and it feels so good, and you have this period of time that feels magical

where you're getting things done. And then, because you haven't changed the behaviors and the

instincts and the muscle memory at your in your home base, how you operate normally,

and you haven't retrained that, the old habits start to creep up, the old situations start to weigh

in, and pretty soon you find your momentum is shifted, and then it could be a week,

could be a month, could be a couple months down the line. You're like, why do I feel like I'm

back where I started? At this place, because what is critical hasn't happened, that's when a

person starts to seek another seminar, another coach, another, if I just go this program again,

and it's another pill, and the difficulty with this, I mean, I almost want to call itself

help addiction, even though I don't like the word addiction, and it's not diagnosed in the DSM

or anything like that that I'm aware of. It's not a thing, but this I've seen happen over and

over and over again. When I got out of pornography, all those years ago, this like perpetual use of it,

and all the stuff that goes with it, right? When I got rid of that, I was still eating a lot of

sugar. It's pretty common, and I was still eating a lot of sugar beforehand,

but I found that I had gotten out of it, and I was having these moments that were really clear,

and so I started craving those cathartic, cathartic means cleansing, right? Moments,

and I can produce them on my own to a certain extent, but then I would find a coach or somebody

online who like, oh man, I really love their content, I really love their material, and then as I

listened to it more and I really got to learn from that guy, and then my mind would start to go like,

man, if I don't really have his help, I'm not sure my life will get better, and that's what

marketing is supposed to do, is make you feel like their solution is the only solution that will

help you, and the world of marketing, I really dislike it, I really do, and this podcast is

potentially marketing. The reality is none of us are a savior, none of us are the source of healing,

I think I've talked about that recently, healing comes from a very different place,

and so we're here and we're in this place, so I find a coach, and so I buy the coaches

program, and it's helpful, and I'm having these aha moments and these breakthroughs, and then I

come back home and I adjust what I'm doing, and the momentum dies out. So then I go back to that

coach, or I find another coach, and we go and the momentum dies out, and many wives have watched

this in their husbands, many husbands have watched this in their wives, and they've tried to say

things, but of course the person going through this is like, no, this is this is the stuff, like I've

finally found it, this is it, well the other person is sitting back going like when is the other

shoe going to drop, when is the next thing going to hit, and Jasmine bless her heart, she's

been through a lot of that, a lot of different arenas for me, because I didn't realize this was

happening, and so this cycle of self-help, this is the most innocuous form of it, is that you go in,

you develop some sense of like, oh, I've just shifted some things, I've got some personal

empowerment now, I have a sense that it really is possible for me, whether it's law of attraction

stuff, or whether it is business coaching, or whether whatever else, like you get some sort of

clarity on your situation, that clarity, clarity is very, very useful, very good, there's

nothing wrong with it, but that clarity give you an aha moment, and your brain thinks something

magical has happened when the only thing that happened was your brain made a new chemical for a

bit and broke some neuropathways a little bit down and freed up some space and created something new,

it's the aha moment is the feeling of throwing out the trash, that's it, but it has not changed

anything in your life, it has not changed your environment at all, and so I didn't know that,

so I go from one to the next, trying to learn how to do it on my own so that I don't have to keep

paying money, but you end up spending a lot of money on these places, and I know people who they

have the best intentions, but their mind frame around this is like, I'll never be without a coach,

I will, like I want, when I get to the judgment seat with God, I want to have spent more money on

personal development than on anything else in my life, that is not, these are Christians,

but that's not a Christian mindset at all, the Christian mindset has nothing to do with that,

because the true personal development is the one who made you finally gets room in your life,

not, oh, I'm going to learn to do all these things on my own, and I'm going to develop this mastery,

and I'm going to have developed my person, which is just a word that means mask, I'm going to develop

this fake identity that I believe is real, that I've carried with me my whole life, and I've

propped up and done all this effort to preserve that, I'm going to spend a lot of money on,

that has nothing to do with spiritual growth at all, but it gets sold as spiritual growth,

it gets sold as this new environment, like this new frontier, this transcendent reality,

and then at some point, in those circles, you're going to meet people who are going to talk

about energy healing, you're going to meet people who are going to talk about shifting your energy,

you're going to meet people who talk about using psychedelics to do it, or micro-dosing,

which is just psychedelics and small doses that you're supposed to not notice, or you're going

to get people that are going to talk about energy healers, or shamans, or deep experiences,

and meditation, and whatnot, in order to get to this next plane, or supplements and

neutropics, and all these other things, in order to chase this phantom that you've created in your

mind, which is all like this is this addictive cycle, I need the next hit, and then there's a

come down, and then you need another hit, and then there's a come down, and you need another hit,

and the last hit isn't good enough, so you need a higher breakthrough, and a bigger reality,

because you're already used to the old one, and the old one didn't work, so you need a better one.

That is, that's like the description of addiction, and what I've seen happen in collateral damage,

in very real terms is people lose a lot of money and a lot of years to it, and that's the more

in like, inane version of it, or the the the the tammest version of it. There are people who go and

get a little bit of help, and then move on with their life, and that's great, I love that they

can do that. There's a large percentage of them, that like they just spend a whole lot of money,

spend a whole lot of years doing these things, and one day they realize like nothing's really changed,

I'm still in the same place I was five, ten years ago. There's also a large percentage of people,

that when they go there, not only do they not really get anywhere, and you know they might increase

any income for a little bit, and they might do some other stuff, and it's not like some elements

don't improve, they might feel a lot of peace and love and joy in all these things, it's not like

it's a bad experience, so they wouldn't keep doing it. But at the end, at a certain point, it's sort

of dumps them, and I've seen these people like, whether it's just like, healings that eventually

don't actually turn out to be healings at all, or whether it is, and that's the physical sort of

like energy healing side of things, or whether it's just they've got all this money, they've been

taken advantage of, and all of, and at a certain point they just get dumped on their on their can,

and they realize this was all just this self perpetuating promise that never gets fulfilled.

Then there's this deep disillusionment, I've seen people like because of this, they get involved

in this arena, and their spouse isn't, is at home, and they don't, they're not as involved,

and their spouse is resistant to it in some way, and so then that breaks their marriage up,

because they're, they're evolving, and their spouse doesn't want to evolve with them, and so they

end up going in a different direction. I've seen a lot of them get spiritually diluted, and they lose

their faith, and their hope in God, and they start to become believers that they are God incarnate,

or that like the bride of God, or something, and they have this mission to change the world.

And you have this drive toward this massive purpose. I was on the phone the other day with a

person who told me that their mission was to help a hundred billion people resolve their deep,

deep hurts in their wounds, and that to me is insanity speaking, and of course they know that,

so they say, hey, this is going to require rethinking the math, right? Obviously you have to

understand how many people have been born, by the largest estimates I've seen, only 50 billion

people have been born. So this person is attempting to help more humans than have ever existed,

with problems that are assumed that they have, and so she's thinking future generations and she's

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Past generations, and I actually really applaud that level of ambition, and I think it's a really

wonderful to have that sense of purpose. But the problem is that's a vague purpose that doesn't

deal with the person in front of you. You can't love a hundred billion people. Love is something

that you experience and share. You can't love a class. It's a category. It's a mental category.

You experience this deep connection with a person and with other people. It's very personal,

and it has nothing to do with these large numbers and these vague things, but these get proposed

in these business conferences and in these self-help cycles. Whether it's a person healing trauma

from seven generations or 70 generations past, and so they're doing this work for all their

ancestry. Whether it's healing, like all that generational trauma, whether it's healing trauma

and saving stuff from their future generations, there's this inflated sense of what's going on,

and nobody is grounded in the reality of the moment. But because it feels so good and because

it often comes with a lot of nurture, with a lot of excitement, or with challenge and breakthrough,

and aha moments or whatever else it is, it develops this high in the body, and that high is just

an experience. You can go on a roller coaster and feel pretty high, and they're remarkably

similar in places, depending on your relationship to roller coasters, I suppose. And you can get

off and you can just feel like, yeah, on top of the world, it's just that you're thinking about

different subjects at the time, but the body feeling is more or less the same. And then there's a

come down from that feeling. After the come down comes a desire to not be in that come down.

And so we look for something to help make it better. What was the last thing to work? Was it a

roller coaster? Was it a business conference? Was it a twinkie? Was it pornography on a computer?

What was it? This is the addictive cycle. And so that is described. And basically, if we were to

define addiction, we're going to look at it and go, addiction comes from two parts, like the word

itself means to say yes to something, like addiction, you like to say something like a dictionary,

the things we say. And then like an edict from a king, the thing that came out of the king,

you know, and whatnot. And then you have an adict, which is to say toward or to say yes to,

or to speak towards something, meaning like you're headed that direction.

Right? And so you have this sense of addiction literally means the habit of saying yes to something

before you have the ability to stop yourself from the behaviors that come after it.

So before you can stop all the behaviors that come downstream of it, you have to stop

that saying yes. And it's just a habit of saying yes. And the something you're saying yes to

is not the behavior. It's not the porn. It's not the food. It's not the thing you're saying

yes to is your view of the world before it shows up. Like your view of your circumstances,

your automatic reactions of you're just agreeing that your reaction and the way you're seeing

things is reality. And because you're saying yes to that, all the behaviors that you cope with

that reality with are part and parcel of the whole thing. They're the byproducts of the of the

factory, right? And so in order to stop saying yes to things, we got to we got to go back to the

beginning and look at what is really going on. I spent so much time on this with people and

and it's really difficult because we're so used to seeing what we think is there.

It takes work. It's hard. And on the phone, it's like I can almost hear people's brains

over like frying and overloading at times and like shutting down because it's just too much load

to go like wait, what? I have to like move all this junk I've put on top of reality to see what's

under there. That's so much work. I would rather keep it covered because at least it looks pretty.

And that's what we've done. We've dressed up reality with our imaginations.

So this this movement in the self-help world, I have seen over and over and over again, it was me.

And fortunately it didn't go to the point of me having an affair or hooking up with somebody or

losing marriage and kids and divorce, right? Fortunately that. Fortunately, it didn't go to I mean,

but it did go to financial bankruptcy at one point. It like in a big way. And that was like at

the beginning of it because I couldn't manage the funds well. But fortunately it didn't go to

like death but there were sort of like suicidal moments in the middle of it and there were moments

where I just didn't want to exist. It did go to failed business ventures. It did go to me being

an absentee father at times. It did go to a constant focus on that rather than a relationship with

the God that made me in the first place. It did go to me building up some ego about who I am and

what I deserve and what life is and all this other stuff as if I were a God and I never got to

the point thankfully of believing I was God incarnate. But those thoughts did cross my mind at times.

I will admit. And that's all the psychosis that comes from what happens in this like self-help

aha moment break through industry and the personal coaching and life coaching industry. And

if you've been paying attention to the news with the Epstein files and everything else,

a lot of these life coaches are involved in some deep stuff. And I know some I know somebody

who was Anton Wasbisky. He has a YouTube channel. You know, I've you know, I've talked to them

personally who was the marketer for a lot for like 40 different of these new age coaches.

And the stuff they do behind the scenes and what they're engaged in and what they're doing

and what they're inviting in as you're getting these breakthrough moments is downright creepy

and scary and it goes beyond just all this stuff falls apart. It's like demonic almost,

you know, like I mean in some cases it is like they're they're outright doing some rituals that

are calling in other beings and and so like but you don't see that on the front. You don't see

that on the front page and the people that are in those circles most of them don't know that it's

happening. They don't know what it's happening to them. They think it's just peace and love and

light and all of these other things and it comes with this great pretty package. And you know,

those are the worst ones. Those are the worst case scenarios. Obviously not everybody is in that

place. They don't know what they don't know and not everybody is following those people. But even

in the teamest measure, this self-help cycle and addiction is very very observable. You can

observe it in a lot of people. You can observe it in people that want to do bodywork and they learn

one form of bodywork and then they geek out on it and they want to learn another one and they want

to learn another one and they want to learn another one and the question of like why do you want to

learn it. There are some people that are genuinely interested in understanding the body. That's not

the issue. A lot of them are chasing these things because it feels like that is the next

savior that's dangerous. You can see it with people who are in counseling professions maybe less.

I'm not a counselor so I don't know exactly. I haven't observed it firsthand. But I've just heard

here and there from some of the counselors I've talked with how much like learning a new theory

and keeping up all this other stuff just feels like it's a thing. I don't think most counselors are

in that boat so I don't know. I could be wrong but most of it I see in this life coaching industry.

I see it in the energy healing world a ton where people just collect modalities and they learn

one modality and another modality and they're trying to be the source of everybody's healing

without recognizing that healing doesn't come from them but it's because it like there's this moment

of like discovering that you have new skills and this moment of feeling good about yourself and

this moment of feeling like you can contribute. Those are not necessarily bad things.

Contribution to the world is wonderful. Learning a skill that you can help people with is great.

I'm talking about this cycle of chasing more and going for more and going for more without actually

sitting with what's real and doing what's necessary with your situation right now and not

not getting on balance and not losing sight of all of the pieces of your life, your family,

your relationship with God, your work life and your individual interests and making sure that

those live in a really good way, good and healthy way. So hopefully I know this has been a long

episode but I'm raising a warning flag of caution from my own personal experience. I mean the

self-help thing led me to the Himalayas with Sadguru and some deep disillusionment down on the other

side of that one and exorcisms and all kinds of stuff. I'm speaking from personal experience when

I'm telling you I'm not the only one that was on those trips and in those seminars and doing

those things and I've spoken to many people that are still recovering from their experiences there

and there's a lot of people that are still in them and love it and they think it's wonderful

and they're giving their life more and more to it, more and more time, more and more effort,

more and more energy and it's beautiful to them. That's great. That's where I was for a while and

then it led me to the edge of the cliff of my own sanity wondering why the heck I was, why,

what is the point of my existence? Not suicidal. I feel great but why am I here? I'd lost some things

in the way. So I've seen this and then I've seen it in hundreds of other people

watching them from the sidelines. People I know people I was in masterminds with, people I was in

these coaching programs of watching them lose money, hand over fist, not for legitimate expenses.

Like if you're going to go to a retreat it's going to cost a bunch to be able to run that retreat

but like if you're somebody's time and they're taking your time and resources and what not,

so that they can help you out. Okay, cool. You're paying for time and labor and things like that.

You're paying for results. That's true, right? And so if it's worth it for you, great. But

I've seen people lose lots and lots of money, go into massive amounts of debts and constantly

have to pay off those debts in order to have their next hit and the next thing and then I see them

a year later or two years later and they're still in the same cycle. And I don't I don't want that

for me anymore. I certainly don't want that for anybody listening. And so I bring this up as like

a warning flag, a shot off the bow, a cautionary tail. And the people who are in it will likely hear

this and think, you know what? But that's not me. I'm okay. I can do this. And I just take a step

back and ask, just take a step back and pause. What I'll tell my kids is like to help them understand

addiction, what I'll tell them is if you can't stop it immediately and put it down, then it's unhealthy.

Right? If you can't just like if I just say, hey, time to shut off the TV and they're like,

hold on, I just want to finish this. That's already unhealthy. Unless they've stopped it, paused it,

and then come to me and said, hey, dad, can I can I just finish the show? I would like to finish

the show, please. And I'll look at it. I'm going to be like, dude, do you pause it when I ask you to?

How much time is left? Let's look at it. And if it's a no, it's a no. If it's a yes, it's a yes.

But if they can't, if they continue doing what they're doing, despite the request to do something

different, that's unhealthy. And as adults, we don't have a parent that we have to be obey in that same

way anymore. And so you're going to have to do it to yourself. Could you pause for a week? Could you

pause for a month? Could you pause for six months and put it all down? Could you pause for a year and

put it all down? If not, like it put all the like chasing of new things down, right? If not,

there's an issue, right? If you need coaching in order to be functional, that's a problem.

You might need coaching in order to get rid of some dysfunction. But if you need ongoing

coaching for the rest of your life, in order to live a fulfilling life, in my opinion, obviously,

that's a problem. And I have people I know, friends, old coaches that I paid for their coaching

and stuff, who would tell me that that's probably a mindset issue. And I need to shift my thinking

and all that other stuff. But I've tasted the fruits that come at the other end of this. And they

are bitter or sour, one of the two. And all the sweetness that it starts with eventually goes away.

And so you keep having to find different coaches, different sweetness, different, you know,

sugar substitutes in order to get it until finally, you just overloaded and you got to throw up.

And so having tasted that, I'm hoping that this episode is useful in just raising a warning flag

about that. And if we can maybe look at this idea of self-help addiction. And I don't know,

I'd be curious if therapists are here listening. If there is, if they would look at some people who

are in therapy, and like these people are just addicted to therapy. And that's a problem. They've

become dependent on therapy in order to function. That feels like a problem as well. It's a problem

in my mind, but I would be curious, you know, the therapist that do listen. Shoot me, no, let me know.

What's going on? Otherwise, for you all, be careful of self-help. Because in the end,

you ain't the one beating your own heart. There's someone else that is the true him.

And that's enough to chew on for now. To dive deeper into any of this and experience what it's

like to build an automatic muscle memory that produces joy and freedom, even in difficult

circumstances, visit findtheorigin.com. And don't forget, God, the real origin of both life and

happiness is closer even than your heartbeat and the very reason you and I still have one,

despite everything we keep doing to push him away.